January 2011 archive

Bring together the words "touchscreens" and "nanotubes" in the same sentence and it's likely to generate a bit of a buzz. After all, anything that combines the intuitive appeal of the former with the remarkable properties of the latter is bound to be something rather special. Isn't it?

But tap, pinch or drag your fingers across the carbon touchscreen developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation in Stuttgart, Germany, and you'll get just same sort of interactive experience you'd expect from any other consumer display.

So what gives? Does the superior strength of the nanotubes make the screen highly rugged and durable? Nope. Nor is it particularly lightweight. In fact the carbon touchscreen fails to exploit any of the novel and exotic thermal, photonic or semiconductor properties that nanotubes possess.

Forget the dog-eared holiday paperback: you'll be reading an ebook on the beach this summer, if Amazon's latest sales figures are anything to go by.

For the first time, Amazon's Kindle book sales have overtaken those of their paperbacks, making ebooks the company's most popular format in the US. In a statement published on their website, Amazon announced:

"Amazon.com is now selling more Kindle books than paperback books. Since the beginning of the year, for every 100 paperback books Amazon has sold, the Company has sold 115 Kindle books. Additionally, during this same time period the company has sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books."

Kindle sales first overtook hardbacks back in July of 2010. But this latest announcement marks a much more significant step forward. The company's aggressive marketing of digital books seems to have helped it achieve its first ever $10 billion quarter at the end of last year, and ebook sales look set to keep breaking records.

Last December, the Kindle device replaced J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" as Amazon's biggest-selling single product ever, and the Kindle store itself now boasts over 810,000 titles.

Amazon has very cleverly separated hardback and paperback sales in these newly-released figures - and remained tight-lipped about the raw sales numbers for the time period they quote in their release. The Guardian points out that this differentiation actually "suggests that the online retailer still sells 120 print books for every 100 ebooks sold". So in absolute terms, the hard-copy book still outsells its digital counterpart.

Nevertheless, the news suggests that the Kindle's success is sealed as the champion of e-readers - and maybe even reading, full stop.

With President Barack Obama urging America to respond to a new "Sputnik moment" by investing in innovation to create jobs, New Scientist decided to see which US cities are already pulling their weight in high-tech invention - and which ones need to play catch-up.

In the graphic below, urban areas are rated on the number of patents awarded, compared to predictions from a scaling law that takes each city's size into account. You can track changes over time, roll over the bubbles and bars to see more data, and find cities by typing part of the name into the search box.

The data comes from a wider analysis of how attributes of cities vary with their size, which we covered back in November.

Looking at the graphic, it's tempting to see a parallel with another red/blue divide. Draw your own conclusions from The New York Times's map of results from November's elections to the House of Representatives - but bear in mind that cities tend to vote Democrat while rural areas sway Republican, which may distort the comparison with our city-only map.

The PirateBox broadcasts an open WiFi network that anyone in the vicinity can anonymously join. Once connected, users can upload and download any files they please - effectively creating a temporary and portable file sharing network. You don't need to log in and no user data is recorded, so file-sharers are free to trade whatever they like.

Darts built the device, originally called Freedrop, as an easy way to share files with his students in class. "I was looking for a device that would allow users in the same physical space to easily share files," he says. It was a hit, but he soon found that his students had other sharing plans. "Students started sharing non-class related materials, their favorite albums and so on."

This alternative use inspired Darts to place the Freedrop inside a pirate-themed lunchbox, inevitably leading to the name PirateBox. But is he encouraging piracy? "Pirate is a strange term," says Darts, who prefers to see the device as a tool for sharing content of any kind. "But calling it the PirateBox is certainly provocative."

If you fancy making your own PirateBox, Darts provides instructions for building one at a cost of around $100. It's not the first time file-sharing has entered the real world though - last year artist Aram Bartholl installed USB sticks in walls and buildings around New York to create a series of digital dead drops.

John Gilmore, internet activist and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, famously said "The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." But what happens when all online routes are cut off?

At around 10.30 pm GMT last night, the Egyptian government shut down the entire country's connection to the internet, leaving its citizens unable to access websites hosted in the rest of the world. Attempts to access Egyptian sites from outside also fail - for example, http://egypt.gov.eg/ is currently unresponsive - while Egyptian access to .eg domains is likely to be extremely unreliable.

(Image: News Pictures/MCP/Rex Features)

Protesters against the government had been coordinating their actions on social networking sites, leading the government to block the likes of Twitter and Facebook, but many got around these restrictions by using smartphones or proxy servers. Now, access through any means is almost impossible - Egypt is effectively offline.

"The Egyptian government's actions tonight have essentially wiped their country from the global map," said James Cowie of Renesys, a internet access monitoring company, in a blog post last night. "What happens when you disconnect a modern economy and 80,000,000 people from the internet?"

Google's famous "don't be evil" commitment, made in the firm's infancy, has elicited two kinds of response over the years. Fans of corporate responsibility hail the commitment, while more cynical tech-watchers suggested that it was only a matter of time before the need to compete forced Google to make some unsavoury decisions.

The latter group can now notch up another point in their favour. TorrentFreak, a tech blog, revealed today that Google has begun censoring search terms relating to torrent files, a file-sharing system. Terms such as "uTorrent", the name of a piece of torrent software, now no longer appear in the instant results that appear as you type terms into Google's search box.

The censorship is not complete: results for torrent-related terms do appear when you do a full Google search. They're just missing from the instant results. This is in line with changes announced by Google in early December.

Why is this evil? Many people will say it isn't. The internet is awash with torrents for pirated movies, music and software. The recording industry, for one, has long argued that Google and others should do more to restrict access to this content.

The problem is that Google is taking a clumsy approach. Many file-sharing sites are omitted from the list of censored terms. More importantly, uTorrent and some of the other terms refer to perfectly legal pieces of software, or the also legal companies behind the software. The software might be used for illegal purposes, but it also has legitimate applications, such as allowing new bands to release music for free.

So why did Google throw out an anti-piracy net that catches the good with the bad? The company isn't commenting on the changes, but many observers suspect that pressure from copyright holders, notably the music industry, has forced Google to implement a less than perfect fix.

On a final note, it looks like Google has either tweaked its censorship, or hasn't yet rolled out all the changes to all users. My searches, made around 10:30am Pacific time today, produced instant results for "uTorrent" and other terms that TorrentFreak says have disappeared. Some terms, like "Rapidshare", a file-sharing website, did appear to be censored.

While Volkswagen's new XL1 "Super Efficient Vehicle" might look like a "futuristic" concept car designed sometime in the late 1980s, its figures are undoubtedly impressive.

Unveiled at the Qatar motor show on Tuesday night, the XL1 claims an incredible fuel consumption of just 0.9 litres per 100 kilometres (equivalent to 239 miles per gallon). VW also says it emits just 24 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre.

Packed bumper to bumper along the street, a long line of parked cars might not strike you as a particularly healthy sight.

But the way those cars are parked could actually be good for you - at least, that's what new simulations of air flow in streets suggest. While parallel parked cars can successfully deflect exhaust from the sidewalk, blocking between 31 and 49 per cent of the pollutants, angled parking could increase exposure by up to 288 per cent, say researchers.

A team of engineers at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland released carbon dioxide as a pollutant into their computer-generated streets that were 20 to 25 metres wide, with the building heights matching the width. The wind blew across the street, from right to left over the buildings, with some of the fresh air running down the left wall. Much of the air blew across the road and up the face of the opposite buildings, taking pollutants with it.

But when parallel parked cars were parked alongside the left side of the street, the three-metre-wide footpath caught much of the fresh air in an eddy. On the right footpath, the cars served as a wall, directing the air from the road to flow above it while less-polluted air circulated in its own eddy for the pedestrians to breathe.

Companies take a number of measures to protect their confidential data, but a survey of 1,000 British office workers by computer security firm Symantec reveals that these efforts are being sabotaged by their own employees who see such measures as an inconvenience.

If you work in an office then you probably had to use some combination of keycards and passwords first thing this morning, but when it comes to data security you're mostly free to do what you like once logged in at your desk - and it seems that many people do exactly that. Just over half of workers polled have removed company information from their workplace via a variety of methods such as uploading files to sites like YouSendIt or DropBox, emailing them to webmail accounts or transferring them USB sticks and other external drives.

Most respondents said they were doing so for legitimate reasons like working from home or at offsite meetings, but nearly a third admitted taking their company's data to a new job. While that's obviously bad for business, even seemingly harmless actions can put a company at risk.

"These findings point to the concept of a negligent insider, employees who have legitimate access to an IT system and who might cut corners to make life easy for themselves," says David Wall, a professor of criminology at Durham University who analysed the survey data for Symantec. "During the course of their work they will accept organisational goals, but only as far as they do not encumber them with much more additional work, or can be used to lighten their load."

The obvious solution would be to provide in-house versions of file-transfer sites and up the often meager corporate inbox allowances that are forcing employees to use external services. So next time you find yourself emailing that massive report to your Gmail account, why not email the IT department and ask for a few extra gigabytes instead? Yeah right...

Mozilla and Google, reacting to US government pressure, will add Do Not Track tools to their popular web browsers Firefox and Chrome to make it more difficult for advertisers to collect data on users and to personalise ads.

The feature, developed at Stanford University, would include a "header," a small piece of information transmitted by your computer when you click on a website. It will tell advertisers that you do not want them to gather information about where you have been or what you've done on the web.

Currently, advertisers can tell where a user goes and can tailor advertisements to that behaviour, so-called online behavioural advertising. Click on an airline website and advertisers know you are interested in travelling and can send ads custom designed for you.

Last month both the US Department of Commerce and the Federal Trade Commission urged browser manufacturers to find ways to protect users' privacy. Commerce suggested guidelines to warn customers what information was being gathered and recommended consumers be given the opportunity to opt-out. The FTC recommended a Do Not Track list similar to what Mozilla and Google are adding.

Mozilla announced the plug-in for Firefox on Sunday. Google's plug-in, called Keep My Opt-Outs, was announced Monday.

The Do Not Track plug-in method, however, has a large flaw: it depends on
the advertisers' agreeing to abide by your wishes. If an advertiser
doesn't want to honour your request, there currently is no way to make
it comply.

"Our initial proposal does not represent a complete solution," he admitted. The ability of advertisers to refuse to honour the user's request is a "chicken and egg problem" he hoped would be addressed in upcoming versions of Firefox.

It's not clear how far browser manufacturers will go beyond plug-ins like Do Not Track to limit ads. Google makes its money on advertising and would not want to anger too many advertisers. Mozilla, a nonprofit corporation, gets its funding through an arrangement with Google to share in ad revenue. According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft wanted to add an ad-blocking plug-in to the current version of Internet Explorer, IE 8, but backed down in the face of pressure from advertisers.

The other major web manufacturers appear supportive of Google and Mozilla's move. Microsoft says the new version of its browser, IE 9, still under development, will have something equivalent to a black list, but you would have to collect the list yourself. Neither Apple (Safari) nor Opera have announced similar plans.

Back in December, New Scientistpredicted that the impact of the US embassy cable releases by WikiLeaks would likely inspire a legion of leak-publishing imitators to spring up - and this is indeed coming to pass. But it's far from clear how the newbies in this fast-emerging leaky landscape are going to behave. Will they exercise some kind of editorial restraint, or will they publish everything the get their hands on? And how will they protect their sources?

Before Christmas, a handful of diminutive leak sites announced their arrival: Brussels Leaks in the EU and IndoLeaks in Asia, for instance. OpenLeaks, a direct rival to Wikileaks, is in development as is an Italy-based upstart, GlobalLeaks.

But in a major change, the regular mainstream media are getting in on the act - most notably the Qatar based global TV network Al Jazeera, and The New York Times. Al Jazeera - probably best known for broadcasting recordings smuggled out of the terrorist Osama Bin Laden's hideout - says it wants its audience to upload documents, photos, audio and video to its Transparency Unit website. An "upload your files" button leads to an allegedly anonymous "dropbox" where leakers can describe and save files online.

How secure it is is not clear, however. Al Jazeera's "terms of use" document highlights the risks: it accepts "no responsibility for any loss or injury caused to you" and "no responsibility for claims of defamation you may incur as a result of submitting content to this website". The website, it warns, also places a (trackable) cookie on a leaker's computer. Not too reassuring for someone wishing to stay anonymous.

Your computer is full of garbage. No, not the hundreds of downloads cluttering up your hard drive that you keep meaning to delete, but the wasted by-products of everyday computation. The logic gates within your computer's processor constantly input and output information, but not every output ends up being useful. The energy used to generate these "garbage outputs" is lost and dissipates as heat. So why not recycle it?

That's the idea behind reversible logic, a theoretical approach to computation that could prove useful in quantum computing. In a reversible logic gate, every output can be transformed back in to its input. Actually building such a logic gate is a difficult and as yet incomplete task, but the benefits would be enormous - since no information is lost, no heat is dissipated.

Now, Himanshu Thapliyal and Nagarajan Ranganathan, a pair of computer scientists at the University of South Florida, US, have brought the technology one step closer by describing an error correcting scheme for reversible logic. Previous efforts could only detect single-bit errors, but their new method can deal with multi-bit errors, an essential requirement for practical reversible computing.

It works by reversing the computation on a series of outputs and comparing the result to the original inputs. If the two match, the calculation is guaranteed to be error-free. This method is actually better than the error-correction in current computers, which works by repeating the original calculation and comparing the result - a method which won't identify identical errors in both calculations. And since they use "garbageless" reversible logic gates, no energy is wasted.

The work is highly theoretical for now, but Thapliyal and Ranganathan demonstrate how it could be applied to a particular type of quantum computing known as quantum dot cellular automata. Get that right, and wasteful computing could be a thing of the past.

But it poses major risks dissidents and data leakers as well. How? The internet's data "packets", by design, contain their source and destination addresses. And that means the likes of emails, web page requests, tweets and Facebook updates can all be tracked.

This is said to have helped the Iranian security services during the 2009 uprising - allowing dissidents communicating via Twitter and Facebook to have their connections blocked or their movements tracked. Haystack, a source-obfuscating program, didn't work: it seemed too good to be true, and it was. Iran is even tracking dissidents in exile.

It seems there may be no such thing as an environmentally-friendly product.

Electronics and car manufacturers constantly bombard us with information about how much more energy efficient their latest models are than previous offerings. And while this may be true, in reality such improvements are wiped out by manufacturers' efforts to pack an ever increasing number of functions into their devices, or by users taking advantage of the energy savings to make greater use of the gadget or vehicle.

"Increased use usually cancels efficiency gains," says Eric Williams at Arizona State University in Tempe, who has compared trends in the energy needed to produce a given product with changes to the way consumers use the device.

As an example, Williams' team looked at changes to Intel microchips between 1995 and 2006. When they studied the electricity used to produce each transistor, they found this decreased by a whopping 99 per cent over the period. But when they then looked at the electricity used to make a typical microchip, they found that despite some fluctuations, it remained roughly the same.

The trouble is that while technological progress has reduced the amount of energy consumed in the fabrication process, it has also created a demand for ever more powerful chips, which means packing far more transistors into a given space, says Williams.

The trend seems to be a general one, he says. "While at smaller screen size liquid crystal displays use less energy than cathode ray tubes, the LCD technology enables much larger screens, resulting in televisions that use more net energy than previous generations." And while the fuel efficiency of cars in the US has improved dramatically in recent decades, more driving means the amount of fuel consumed per person has gone up.

The holographic images are still rather fuzzy. But just a couple of months after the first demonstration of holographic telepresence, the frame rate has jumped a factor of 30, from one frame every two seconds to an impressive 15 frames per second.

Michael Bove's group at the MIT Media Lab achieved the feat by hacking the camera sensor from a Kinect gesture-recognition system for Microsoft's Xbox 360 and crunching data with standard graphics chips.To give their demonstration extra flair, graduate student Edwina Portocarrero dressed up as Princess Leia from Star Wars and recreated the famous holographic projection of a plea for help from the movie.

The real holographic image couldn't match the resolution achieved by special effects in the movie, Bove says, but adds, "Princess Leia wasn't being transmitted in real time. She was stored" in R2-D2's memory.

Can you balance a pencil on the tip of your finger? Probably not, but then you aren't a high-speed robot with artificial retinas.

Researchers at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, built their pencil-balancing bot to demonstrate that sometimes too much information can make a task harder. Balancing large poles is a well-known exercise in robotics research, but scaling down to a pencil hadn't yet been achieved because robots couldn't react fast enough.

These previous robots were hindered by their video-camera vision, which required them to process a full frame of video to identify changes in their environment. The new robot uses a pair of silicon retinas that only react to sudden changes in illumination, transmitting a simple "on" or "off" response that reduces the need for complex data processing - an approach that mimics biological vision.

Placing the two sensors at a right angle provides enough information for the robot to estimate the position of the pencil and react to keep it standing.

Could this be the next executive toy - the most advanced pencil holder in the world?

Sabyasachi Sarkar and colleagues at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur have developed a technique to dissolve carbon nanotubes in water, allowing them to be taken up by plants without damaging them. When the team fed their nanotube solution to chickpea plant seeds they found it more than doubled their shoot length and increased their root growth and water uptake.

The nanotubes increase the prominence of channels in the plants that allow them to absorb much more water.

It's one of aviation's most dastardly problems: in a perfectly clear sky, an aircraft suddenly hits severe turbulence that gives it a terrifying shaking, or which makes the plane plummet as aerodynamic lift is lost in a low pressure air pocket.

This 'clear air turbulence' (CAT) can kill or injure passengers or flight attendants - and pulling negative g as it plummets can stress an airframe so much it has to be withdrawn from service for fatigue checks. And nervous fliers, of course, get ever more nervous.

But fear not: plane maker Boeing has this week filed a US patent application on a smart - and potentially cheap - way to avoid these high-altitude horrors. CAT occurs when vast masses of air move randomly in skies with no cloud or precipitation - and the lack of sizeable water droplets means weather radar does not pick it up.

China's first flight test of its new high-tech J-20 stealth military jet on 11 January has drawn a lot of attention, particularly because it came during the visit of US defence secretary Robert Gates. What it means is another question, and the answers are complex.

It may sound like an environmentalist's pipe dream, but giant greenhouses could soon be popping up in some of the world's deserts, producing fresh drinking water, food and fuel.

The Sahara Forest Project, which aims to create green oases in desert areas, has signed a deal to build a pilot plant in Aqaba, near the Red Sea in Jordan. With funding from the Norwegian government, the team plans to begin building the pilot plant on a 200,000 square metre site in 2012.

"This is a serious safety issue," said U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood in the prepared statement. Deliberately shining a laser at a plane is also a federal offence.

A sudden flash of laser light inside a cockpit can dangerously distract a pilot by imposing the same kind of temporary blindness that often follows a powerful camera flash. The past few years have witnessed a number of what seem to be malicious laser attacks on aircraft. In March of 2008, unidentified individuals wielding four green laser pointers launched a coordinated attack on six incoming airplanes at Sydney Airport.

In February 2009, 12 pilots landing their planes at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport reported similar disturbances. This month 52-year-old Gerard Sasso of Medford, Massachusetts was sentenced to three years in prison after intercepting a State Police helicopter with an industrial grade green laser. He was only the second man in the United States to ever be convicted of lasering an aircraft.

"I think the chances of this happening at cruise altitude are slim, but the chances during take off or approach are pretty good," says Jay Apt a retired NASA astronaut and pilot who currently teaches at the Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business. "Is this a nuisance that people ought to be aware of? Absolutely. I don't want some yahoo waving around his green laser near an airport."

The Food and Drug Administration says that any laser device whose power exceeds 5 milliwatts cannot be marketed or sold as a laser pointer. And the FAA dutifully records any reports from pilots of undesirable lights. But neither of these measures will be nearly as effective as enforcing the legal repercussions already in place around the world. The difficulty is that, in the wrong hands, a laser is the ultimate long-distance weapon - the source of the offence can be incredibly difficult to trace.

If the dangers are truly increasing, governments should reevaluate the commercial status of all laser devices and consider - as with other potential weapons - how to make the gadgets more difficult to buy even in the age of online shopping.

That's the unlikely conclusion drawn by the team of Italian researchers behind a game that teaches the ancient art of cooking tortellini.

The idea strikes me as slightly implausible, but I can't fault the ambition of the team, which is based in part at the University of Bologna. Legend has it that tortellini, or pasta dumplings, are modeled on the bellybutton of the goddess Venus. Whatever the origin, they're a classic Italian dish and one that few home cooks would attempt these days, if only because supermarkets carry decent ready-made versions.

The team started by recording the actions of a sfoglina, the traditionally female chefs who prepare pasta. In the game, the sfoglina's actions are broken down into key steps, such as the circular action used to knead the flour and eggs together. Players attempt to repeat the movement, while a webcam monitors their actions. If the gestures are accurate enough, the player progress to the next stage of the recipe. (Angry Birds, it ain't).

The Bologna researchers designed the system for display at last year's World Expo in Shaghai, although they don't record the impact it had there. Better hardware, such as the depth-sensing camera on the Xbox's Kinect device, which was recently hacked and can now work with PCs and Macs, could be used to generate more sophisticated culinary education systems, they add.

All this makes me feel a touch of Luddism coming on. Want to cook like a pro? Buy a cookery book.

Online video services like Chatroulette that randomly (and anonymously) connect you with another webcam user anywhere in the world can be enormous fun - but lots of people go on looking for a sexual thrill, and they are infamous for being rife with flashers and worse. Much, much worse.

Services - like Blurry People, vChatterand Omegle - often take some measures to limit the damage, like asking that all users be over 16 - but there is no way to police that on an anonymous service and minors may well be online. There are rudimentary filters that detect too much flesh and blur it out, but they are easily fooled.

(Image: Ghiotti/Stone+/Getty)

So how do you protect kids from being assaulted by live images of (mostly male) genitalia?

Happily, one of the themes at web inventor Tim Berners-Lee's annual World Wide Web conference in Bangalore, India, at the end of March is "negative content filtering". Under that rubric, a team led by software engineers at the University of Colorado and McGill University in Montreal, Canada, will be revealing how a suite of smart algorithms they have recently been testing on Chatroulette.com will blank video windows whenever, ahem, overexposed users appear.

It is my pleasure to introduce One Per Cent - New Scientist's blog covering the inspirations and inventions that are driving the cutting edge of technological innovation around the world.

In covering technology for the magazine and online, we've found that there are simply too many good ideas to fit into print and online news stories. Whether still on the drawing board or being wheeled out of the lab and into the real world, the creations that will change the world are happening now, in droves, and they need a place to stand up and be recognised.

That's why we've created this blog. The name is taken from Thomas Edison's famous quote: "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration". And while we'll certainly cover the best in blue-sky thinking here, we'll also tell you about the fruits of the countless hours of labour that follow the first moment of creative genius.

We'll also bring in new voices and fresh perspectives from throughout the world of technology. As much as One Per Cent will be a place to come for the latest, coolest, most inspirational tech news, it will also be a forum for discussion. You can expect ideas from people you've heard of and from people you've never heard of - either way, they're more likely to challenge accepted wisdom than accept it.

We hope you have as much fun reading One Per Cent as we will writing it, and that you'll let us know how we're doing with loads of funny, creative, and informative comments along the way.